Mummy Dearest

By

Barrymore Laurence Scherer

Aug. 27, 2012 4:37 p.m. ET

Utica, N.Y.

The hills of central New York have been alive with the sounds and sights of Egypt this summer. In Cooperstown, the Glimmerglass Opera Festival featured Verdi's "Aida" and the Fenimore Art Museum exhibited costumes from Metropolitan Opera "Aida" productions of the past century. And in Utica, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Museum of Art is presenting the absorbing "Shadow of the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt and Its Influence."

Shadow of the Sphinx:

Ancient Eypt

And Its Influence

Munson-Williams-Proctor Museum of Art

Through Nov. 25

Comprising roughly 150 objects, paintings, works of art, pieces of jewelry and related items from 30 lenders as well as the museum's own collections, the show underscores the fascination with a multimillennial legacy that has long made Egyptology a staple of museum culture. Moreover, it places its venerable subject within a fresh and notably accessible historical context: The exhibition isn't just about ancient Egypt but about its lively effect on fine, decorative and performing art from the Napoleonic era right through Cecil B. DeMille's brand of Egyptofantasy.

The first gallery, "The Burial Chamber," sets the scene with a vivid selection of antiquities concerned with the rites of death, mummification and burial central to ancient Egyptian culture.

Flanking its entrance are two Ptolemaic-period sphinx fragments of carved limestone (332-30 B.C.), their delicately sculpted features softened by the erosion of countless windblown grains of sand. Taking center stage are a wood coffin lid and its base from the Late Dynastic Period (c. 525-343 B.C.) embellished with meticulously carved and painted human and bird motifs. Its splendid condition reminds us how posterity has reaped the preservative benefits of Egypt's dry climate and the painstaking methods of ancient Egyptian craftsmen and funerary workers.

Many of the objects here would have been buried with the dead to accompany them in the afterlife—brilliantly glazed pottery; diminutive, beautifully wrought amulets and jewelry of cast and beaten gold, carved lapis-lazuli, beads of colored faience. A limestone canopic jar (c. 1070-945 B.C.), to contain the entrails removed from a body as part of mummification, resembles a small coffin with carved face and painted eyes. There's also an actual mummified head from the Roman period (c. mid-second-century B.C. to mid-first-century A.D.), its face masked in gold leaf and given painted features, to imitate the solid-gold masks of royal mummies. And striking a poignant note is a mummified cat. Whether it once enjoyed life as a sacred creature or a family pet, now its eviscerated, sausagelike body is tightly wrapped in linen, with feline features painted on the swaddled head, its two perky ears distinct.

Virtually all of the chosen artifacts embody the colors, shapes and decorative motifs from which European and, afterward, American craftsmen derived their highly imaginative Egyptian Revivals, initially sparked by 18th-century archaeological discoveries. Representing the awakening interest is a fanciful English "canopic vase" produced about 1770 by the pottery firm of Wedgwood & Bentley. Possibly inspired by elements in the "Egyptian" mantelpiece designs published in 1769 by the artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, this striking piece is essentially a bulbous neoclassical urn with a finely modeled Egyptian head pre-empting the usual pine-cone finial.

The shiploads of antiquities sent back to France during Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign of 1798 incited the first Egyptian Revival craze during the Directoire and Empire periods and England's Regency. And the lure of Egypt and its surroundings fostered an enduring "Orientalist" school of painting, as European artists voyaged to Egypt and North Africa, where they produced exotic views of deserts, pyramids and street life that found a ready market back home. The show features lush Orientalist canvases by such exponents through successive decades asCharles Théodore Frère, Rudolf Ernst and Joseph Farquharson, which document their fascination with "primitive" life still extant in 19th-century Egypt. Works like Edwin Long's "Love's Labor Lost," Frederick Arthur Bridgman's "Cleopatra on the Terraces at Philae" and Gustave Doré's "Moses Before the Pharaoh" attest to those artists' mastery of romanticized, dramatic interpretations of ancient and biblical themes.

The construction of the Suez Canal and its completion in 1869 sparked a second Egyptian Revival, represented here with examples of opulent, imaginative furniture, silver, glass, lamps and other decorations in the Egyptian taste whose obelisk, pyramid and sphinx motifs lent distinctive flair to French Second Empire and High Victorian design.

Taking a spin on the stylized Egyptian scarab beetle, a massive porcelain paperweight shaped like a startled but anatomically correct beetle and a porcelain vase embellished with another beetle (replete with six legs and probing antennae) represent experimental extremes by the inventive English designer Christopher Dresser during the 1880s.

More beautiful, and more dazzling, are ancient and European scarab-inspired jewelry in the "Jewels of the Nile" gallery, the exhibition's visual climax. Among the dazzlers are a scarab brooch of fire opal and enameled gold by Marcus & Co., New York, and a Swiss gold ladies' watch. Articulated beetles-wings covering the watch face are enameled in royal blue and ablaze with 16 tiny diamonds in star-shaped settings.

The final gallery represents Egypt's hold on 19th- and 20th-century popular culture, reinvigorated by the English archaeologist Howard Carter's 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb. Film posters and other material document successive "Cleopatra" extravaganzas starring Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor; George Bernard Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra" starring Vivian Leigh; "The Mummy" with Boris Karloff and its 1999 remake; "The Ten Commandments," and of course "Death on the Nile." There are vaudeville posters, old souvenir postcards, souvenir pencils, toiletries and other commercial relics that once exploited Egyptian fads.

Most endearing is colorful sheet music for such Tin-Pan Alley numbers as "My Cairo Maid" (1917) and "Ilo (A Voice From Mummyland)" (1921), and the wistful tenor air "Star Light, Star Bright" from Victor Herbert's early operetta hit, "The Wizard of the Nile" (1895). It's a pity that there isn't an accompanying selection of historic recordings to let visitors hear the tuneful melodies behind those inviting covers.

For younger viewers as well as adults, videos and board games introduce aspects of Egyptian culture; bins of flash-cards explain hieroglyphics, Egyptian cats, scarabs and other motifs. There are even "scent stations," whose fragrant boxes of dried seeds and herbs invite visitors to inhale the aromas of "the spicy shores of Araby the blest." Indeed, virtually no stone has been left unturned, as it were, to make this exhibition delightful and memorable.

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